In the Mists

Janáček was 58 when he composed his piano work In the Mists and was beginning to feel that his career was terminally stalled, mainly because he couldn’t get his operas staged in the Bohemian capital of Prague. Much of his disillusion feeds into the four movements of In the Mists, which last 15 minutes in total. The innocuous outline of the opening melody in “Andante”, the first movement, is undermined by restlessly shifting harmonies, while the more expansive, choral-like material that follows is curiously jittery, throwing off cascades of downward-falling notes in its unstable trajectory. The succeeding “Molto Adagio” seems initially more settled in tone, but it too harbours a fluttering instability which makes the point of destination uncertain. The “Andantino” is relatively unruffled by comparison, but in the “Presto” finale an unsettled mood resurfaces and Janáček concludes by quoting a motif from his earlier piano cycle On an Overgrown Path—the call of the barn owl, harbinger of death in folk mythology. The mix of fractured beauty and existential uncertainty achieved by Janáček is typical of his piano music as a whole, and makes In the Mists a uniquely compelling listening experience.